Rob De Feo has spoken to more than 500 startups over the last few years in his role as a startup advocate. These experiences have given him insider knowledge on the patterns leaders in startups face as well as best practices that have helped businesses reach scale.

This week on CTO Connection, Rob takes Peter behind the curtain of life as a startup advocate. They also discuss their biggest career advice: searching for roles based on tasks rather than titles. Tune in for Rob’s insights.

• (01:10) - How Rob got into the tech world
• (01:55) - Joining Expedia
• (05:37) - Becoming a co-founder and CTO
• (07:20) - Moving to Amazon Web Services
• (09:54) - Speaking to start-ups
• (10:45) - Building for now
• (20:17) - Lead geek personalities
• (22:37) - Patterns for early-stage teams
• (29:57) - Getting good advice
• (32:50) - Balance in mentorship
• (35:18) - Becoming a start-up CTO
• (36:51) - Training, coaching, and mentoring

Special thanks to our global partner – Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS offers a broad set of global cloud-based products to equip technology leaders to build better and more powerful solutions, reach out to [email protected] if you’re interested to learn more about their offerings.

CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast-growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!

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Podcast episode production by Dante32.